Light behaves both as a particle and as a wave. Since the days of Einstein, scientists have been trying to directly observe both of these aspects of light at the same time. Now, scientists at EPFL have succeeded in capturing the first-ever snapshot of this dual behavior.

It’s very early in the morning as I type this and I’m still trying to wrap my head around it.

Gone are the fundamental principles of good design: discoverability, feedback, recovery, and so on. Instead, Apple has, in striving for beauty, created fonts that are so small or thin, coupled with low contrast, that they are difficult or impossible for many people with normal vision to read. We have obscure gestures that are beyond even the developer’s ability to remember. We have great features that most people don’t realize exist.

But USB Type-C is still a new technology… and while you can find plenty of cables and adapters available for purchase, it turns out not all of them work the the way you’d expect. Not sure which one to buy? A Google employee is here to help.

I took my first trip to Micro Center in Brooklyn yesterday. I marveled at a brand-name USB-C to USB cable adapter that was going for US$22.95! My god!

(I went there to buy a US$9.99 card r/w for the CLIE’s Memory Stick. Wound up buying one that was priced at US$14.99, on sale for US$5.99. And it also had 3 USB ports! Seeing all the choices not available at Best Buy was a bit of a shock!)

Dame Stephanie Shirley is the most successful tech entrepreneur you never heard of. In the 1960s, she founded a pioneering all-woman software company in the UK, which was ultimately valued at $3 billion, making millionaires of 70 of her team members. In this frank and often hilarious talk, she explains why she went by “Steve,” how she upended the expectations of the time, and shares some sure-fire ways to identify ambitious women …

Oh my god.

What an extraordinary woman!

If you need a dose of inspiration, watch the video at the link. Watch it even if you’re highly motivated!

Two things:

1) Why the hell didn’t I hear about her before today?

2) Why the hell isn’t the BBC doing a mini-series dramatizing her life? Or at least a multi-part documentary?! What a story!

I couldn’t help thinking about Steve Jobs while reading that. And the next two quotes from it.

EVERYTHING’S NEGOTIABLE

If you don’t have the chutzpah to ask for the unthinkable, you’re not dreaming big enough.

Here is the young Steve Jobs, possibly just thirteen, a member of the HP Explorers Club, from Walter Isaacson’s biography:

The kids in the Explorers Club were encouraged to do projects, and Jobs decided to build a frequency counter, which measures the number of pulses per second in an electronic signal. He needed some parts that HP made, so he picked up the phone and called the CEO. “Back then, people didn’t have unlisted numbers. So I looked up Bill Hewlett in Palo Alto and called him at home. And he answered and chatted With me for twenty minutes. He got me the parts, but he also got me a job in the plant where they made frequency counters.”

Boldfaced emphasis added by me.

And wait. There’s more:

His work mainly consisted of “just putting nuts and bolts on things” on an assembly line. There was some resentment among his fellow line workers toward the pushy kid who had talked his way in by calling the CEO. “I remember telling one of the supervisors, ‘I love this stuff, I love this stuff,” and then asked him What he liked to do best. And he said, ‘To fuck, to fuck.” Jobs had an easier time ingratiating himself with the engineers who worked one floor above. “They served doughnuts and coffee every morning at ten. So I’d go upstairs and hang out with them.“

Boldfaced emphasis added by me.

And people think the primary lesson Steve Jobs learned from his father was doing quality work.